Question: Vanessa is 4 years younger than Jessica. Jessica and Vanessa first met 3 years ago. Twenty years ago, Jessica was 5 times as old as Vanessa. How old is Jessica now?
We can use the given information to write down two equations that describe the ages of Jessica and Vanessa. Let Jessica's current age be $j$ and Vanessa's current age be $v$ The information in the first sentence can be expressed in the following equation: $j = v + 4$ Twenty years ago, Jessica was $j - 20$ years old, and Vanessa was $v - 20$ years old. The information in the second sentence can be expressed in the following equation: $j - 20 = 5(v - 20)$ Now we have two independent equations, and we can solve for our two unknowns. Because we are looking for $j$ , it might be easiest to solve our first equation for $v$ and substitute it into our second equation. Solving our first equation for $v$ , we get: $v = j - 4$ . Substituting this into our second equation, we get the equation: $j - 20 = 5($ $(j - 4)$ $ -$ $ 20)$ which combines the information about $j$ from both of our original equations. Simplifying the right side of this equation, we get: $j - 20 = 5j - 120$ Solving for $j$ , we get: $4 j = 100$ $j = 25$.